Spring sun flowing through a wall-to-wall window, Baylee Pearson of Misfit Prints smiled a big grin as she held up her first ever linoleum carving: a salmon peeking its head and tail out of a pair of Xtratuf Boots.
“This was my very first stamp that I ever carved,” Pearson said. “This is what made me (realize), ‘Wow, I can create things with my hands.’”
Next door to a tattoo shop with an upstairs view of Main Street, Pearson’s Haines studio is littered with prints and art from other talented friends across the region. Stacks of upcycled workwear adorned with her kelp, fish and marine mammal designs were neatly folded on a wooden bookshelf next to a hand-made drying rack she was clipping freshly pulled prints into.
On this day she was working on printing her most recent linoleum carving, a scene familiar to anyone who has spent time in Southeast Alaska. Three pairs of worn, brown rubber boots underneath three fresh caught salmon wait at the end of a narrow hallway – calling to mind the many mudrooms that welcome so many Alaskans back to their warm homes after long, often cold, days on the water fishing.
A subsistence hunter and fisher herself, food systems are central to her work and inspiration.
“It’s amazing to be a provider as the smallest person in the family,” she laughed, reminiscing on learning how to moose hunt from her grandfather. “I brought home another moose this year and now six families get to eat all year, so that connection to food is awesome.”
Having been diagnosed with endometriosis in 2023 after over 10 years of symptoms, a connection to healthy food systems is of extreme significance for Pearson as she navigates an illness that has been pushed aside by the medical industry for decades.
“I have to be really careful about what I eat, and that means no processed meat at all. So it’s really important to me to have fish and moose and deer or whatever else we can get our hands on, and that there’s no added hormones or chemicals or anything like that,” she said.
Representation of this chronic condition, one that has been historically understudied, ignored and downplayed, through art is something Pearson says could’ve helped her feel less alone and misunderstood through her own lived experience.
“Lately, I’ve been thinking about telling stories about (my journey with) endometriosis. I don’t know how to put it together yet, but I have been trying to come up with themes to describe the pain and feeling, or to convey how you feel with it in a less literal and gruesome way,” Pearson said. “I’ve just met so many women lately that have such horrifying and similar stories to my own and (…) I just want to also add a little bit more realness and vulnerability to my work.”
“Grandma has always been the creative of the family”
A Sitka native and current Haines resident, Pearson spent the last 10 years between the two locales taking inspiration from the lands she’s spent a lifetime on. Early on, and now continuing into adulthood, much of that inspiration was nurtured through a powerful relationship with her grandmother.
“I mean Grandma has always been the creative of the family: from sewing to painting to mosaics,” Pearson said. “To me, it kind of felt like it was her way of communicating and connecting with me as a kid.”
Having lived in Sitka and Oregon before settling in Haines in the last few years, annual trips to spend time with her grandparents consisted of large-scale art projects spearheaded by her grandmother.
“Whenever she would come to town we had this little art book. Well, it was not little – it was probably the size of me at the time,” Pearson said. “We would just create these giant, beautiful images and scenes with stories. Whether it was paint and crayon or colored pencil, whatever it was, we’d add stickers and googly eyes and all kinds of stuff to it.”
Having been a seamstress in Portland, her grandmother taught her how to knit and sew as well – an introduction to fabrics art that has crossed over into Pearson’s printmaking practice as she makes a name for herself upcycling clothing across town.
Though she began printmaking only two years ago, it has quickly become a form of meditation and a grounding force in her life.
“I have always had anxiety and ADHD and even depression for a really long time. I’m constantly worrying about the future or what happened in the past and kind of ignoring the present,” Pearson shared. “However, when I’m carving all I hear inside my head is just the sound of the metal on the linoleum. The only decision I have to make is the one that’s right in front of me. ‘Which line is next? Do I use a v-gouge or a u-gouge?’”
Hand to tool, tool to linoleum – Pearson finds a unique form of therapy and meditation in the craft that takes her away (even if only temporarily) from the day-to-day.
“I’m not a patient person but I love that all of my hobbies force me to slow down and wait for the result,” she said. “We are surrounded by so much instant gratification all the time: everything is so ‘give me, give me, give me right now,’ and living in Alaska even makes you slow down. Right now there’s so much in my life that is a work in progress, and it forces me to wait for a really awesome result.”
Misfit Prints
Spending time in Haines, the borough of which has a population of just around 2,000 residents, has been foundational to Pearson as she creates under her company name Misfit Prints. As small as the town may be, it is not without a powerhouse community of talented artists and musicians that call the place home.
“I have yet to meet someone who is not an artist – I am surrounded by musicians, painters, weavers, storytellers, textile artists, magicians, chefs, carvers – everyone you can think of, they’re in Haines,” Pearson said of her home.
Jam nights with friends and a long list of events held by the Haines Arts Council dominate her schedule and make the foundation for the rich arts and culture scene that underrides life in her corner of the world. Recent collaborations with the Haines Arts Council and local band Keep the Pool Open showcase Pearson’s support for and strong connection to this side of the community in Haines.
“Truly we don’t have things to distract ourselves with and so we make things. We’re all little hermits – we don’t have a movie theater, we don’t have a bowling alley, we don’t have a ton of restaurants,” she laughed. “We don’t have things to go do, and so (we make those things for ourselves).”
Lately, Pearson has been hosting print nights where folks from the community can bring their pre-owned clothing to various venues around town where she’ll print on them – leaving them with a totally unique, upcycled piece. Her process for these designs starts with a lot of daydreaming, she says, and although she loves her icon work, she’s looking forward to spending more time on complex ideas as her confidence and experience grows.
“I kind of have strayed away from thoughts like, ‘Oh, a fish would look great on this knee of a pair of pants,’ and now I’m kind of thinking more of actual concepts and ideas of scenes, which I’m really excited about,” Pearson said of her evolving practice. Ever important to her work is a commitment to the plants and animals she has grown so intimate with through the course of her life.
“A big motivator behind my interest in botany is making sure that every plant that I include in my prints is accurate to the highest degree,” she said, inspired greatly by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. “Down to the grooves on the petals, everything has to be accurate because I want to respect our local flora and fauna. We’re sustaining off of the plants and animals around us, and I would love to accurately depict that in my work.”
As high of a standard as he holds for her work, Pearson’s approach and philosophy is rooted in a practice of letting go.
“It’s incredibly humbling, and you have to surrender to the ink,” she says of the medium. It was this idea that led her to the name Misfit Prints: “Every single print is different, and there’s mistakes which in the end I don’t really think are mistakes anyway.”
Making preparations to enroll in UAF for a courseload focused around printmaking, Pearson is taking this philosophy alongside her and allowing it to guide her into the unknown. A writer and poet, one of her big goals is to find more ways to integrate her interests in flora, creative writing, and printmaking into one project.
“The ideal would be to be a full-time artist and have the time to sit and work on really meaningful and large pieces and to be able to sustain myself off of that,” she said.
Luckily, Grandma is on her side.
“My grandma actually texted me the other day, and she said she was in the garden and she had a vision that I was a successful printmaker: I was offering classes to the community, and I had a stable income from my art alone,” Pearson said. “That’s my dream and lucky she’s had visions that have become reality before.”
Rachel Levy is a Juneau-based photojournalist whose work culminates at the intersections of environmental justice, arts and culture, and sustainable tourism. A 2022 graduate of Harvard University's Environmental Policy program, she is also the director of the award-winning documentary "Hidden in Plain Sight" that exposes the labor exploitation and colonial framework burdening Tanzania's safari industry.
